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Maxtor DiamondMax Plus9

The DiamondMax Plus9 series is Maxtor's mainstream series and currently comprises thirteen different models ranging from 60 to 200 MB capacity and featuring either 2 MB or 8MB cache. All DiamondMax Plus9 drives are using either the UATA-133 or SATA 1.5 interface with the SATA configuration using the Marvell 8818030-TBC bridge chip and being available only with the 8 MB cache. Like Seagate, Maxtor uses 80 GB platters (40 GB/side), however, not in all cases are the full 40 GB used, that is, depending on how many heads are used by the respective drive, the platters may be shorted to only use 30 GB each. The model number does not reveal the precise configuration of the drive, however, the number of heads is shown as the second digit in the serial number. Keep in mind that drives with a higher "headcount" and shorter platters will show a better "Average" performance and also keep in mind that for real world performance this artificial "Average" value is highly irrelevant.

       

Left to right: The DiamondMax Plus 9 ships in a foam-cushioned box using an antistatic bag plus silica-gel to contain moisture. The model description is shown in the upper right corner whereas the serial nuber and part numbers are in the lower left. The second digit in the SN (circled in red) is the code for the number of heads used.

All DiamondMax Plus9 drives are using 7200 rpm spindles and are rated at 2.7 Bel noise (idle acoustics) with an average seek time of 9.3 ms or less. Since we don't know which seek criteria are being used by Maxtor, the latter is a moot point.

The drive we are looking at today is the DiamondMax Plus 9 160 GB SATA/150 version. As apparent from the serial number, the specific drive we have here uses the full 80GB/platter media capacity, that is, it features a two-platter - four head design. The power consumption of the drive is rated at 670 mA (5V) and 960 mA (12V) for a max power draw of 14.3W. The drive has a total number of 320,173,056 logical block addresses (LBAs) with 512 Bytes each, which translates into 164 billion Bytes or, using a 1024 Bytes / kB conversion, 152 GB capacity.

   

In addition to the SATA power connector, the DiamondMax series also features a standard Molex connector for the power. The cache uses a 4M x16 Hynix-6 SDRAM memory chip (64 Mbit = 8 MBytes).

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